Again, why would you think so? How specifically would a false assertion be recognised? How “solid” a basis would these judgements have?

And not every high school teaches calculus or stats, and not every student gets through them.

EJH - because they’d be able to recognize how solid the various truth claims are? For all the imperfections of the average voter, I’m still a believer in Deweyian democracy. What’s the alternative?

Why would you think so?

Aristotle didn’t use math in his physics or astronomy. What’s your point?

Of course an easier to understand economics wouldn’t end debate (btw, I love your rather flippant sci-fi analogy, considering that people have been using a more easier to understand economics for virtually all of the discipline’s history) – the point is that it would allow the electorate to know when people are making false assertions, because right now they can’t tell. And that’s just as bad a form of public discourse as is resistance to evolution. At least in evolution, people who get a solid grounding in biology can grasp when creationists are trying to pull the wool over their eyes; but if the economics version of a creationists tried to pull a fast one, only economists would see it.

And then we’re running into a problem of democracy, because if a claim of expertise is going to be prioritized over democratic decision-making – as it is in the case of the germ theory of disease and immunization and so forth – you need one hell of a strong claim to empirical correctness and practical results. Economics has (to date) failed to show the goods on that score, which is why I don’t think it can be accorded the status that it’s given in economic policy debates.

How many college-educated people can pick up a paper in any specialised scientific field they didn’t do a degree in, and read it? It took me until the final year of my electrical engineering degree to be able to read a journal paper.

Now, I agree that math is a useful vehicle for doing economics – but it’s not the only one, and a lot of the great foundational works of economics are pre-mathmatical and they’ve hardly lost weight in the discipline.

It’s one thing for maths not to be the only vehicle. It’s another thing for those other vehicles to be as good as mathematics in working out the implications of a hypothesis and in communicating those implications to other economists.

As for those great foundational works, can you please list them? Because I’m not aware of them. For example, The Wealth of Nations is not assigned as reading in Econ 101 classes. every economist I know who has read Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations notices Smith’s use of the labour theory of value, and the lack of marginal analysis. (I’ve read The Wealth of Nations and I found it interesting because of how well Smith got data about the whole economy without the System of National Accounts or any real statistics department, and for the historical insight, but the economic theory didn’t surprise me).

but I wonder if there isn’t a happy medium between de-mathematizing economics (perhaps as a way of re-empiricizing it) and improving our collective educations

In other words you’re engaging in economic SF here. “Wouldn’t it be nice if we could de-mathematise economics?” “Wouldn’t it be nice if we could travel faster-than-light?” “Wouldn’t it be nice if someone could invent cold-fusion?” You might be able to make a nice novel out of your wondering, but unless and until someone actually does figure out how to accomplish a miracle, it seems a bit pointless to inject this sort of speculation into policy debates.

As for your more recent comment, I think that even if we had an easy-to-understand economics, it still wouldn’t resolve public debate. The law of evolution is easy to understand as scientific theories go and has been thoroughly empirically tested, and yet people still attack it whenever it strongly conflicts with their preferred policies, and make up false assertions about it like “evolution operates by random chance”.

The key phrase there was “if it turns out that the actual ways economies actually behave.” We’ve been doing economics for 233 years at least, as we’re still not at the point where economics can accurately and routinely predict economic behavior. If that becomes the case, then we need to do two things – one, we need to make sure that economics are more broadly taught in our schools; two, we need to give economics the same respect for empirical truth that we do for physics or genetics. However, we’re not there – and we’re unlikely to ever get there.

Democracy isn’t just about the ends, however, it’s also about the means, and the means matter on a level of beliefs. Two people might want to build a road, but one wants to do it through public works and establish a public road; the other wants to sell the land to private developers and let them establish a toll-road. It is unlikely that such a debate could ever be resolved by an appeal to expertise, because as we’ve discussed, there’s some deep ideology underneath that expertise, and in a representative democracy, the ideology behind public actions is supposed to be decided during elections.

Hmm. But if it turns out that the actual ways economies actually behave are just as intuitively understandable as quantum mechanics, then what? It seems to me that this could be a very dangerous prescription for substituting truthiness for truth. If economics is going to inform policy by saying things along the lines of “Policy X will produce Result Y”, then we need an economics which makes those statements only if Policy X actually will produce Result Y, and not just if it seems like it ought to.

I think it’s great for the people to decide society’s ends (or, at least, all the known alternatives are worse). But deciding the means may really be a job for experts who understand the complex relationship between means and ends; it’s hard for the people to be expert at everything at once. (Maybe the Internet will help, but I think that people will still superficially browse discussions between experts and come away mainly with their preexisting biases reinforced.)

That, of course, is what representative democracy is supposed to be for; but there’s always a temptation to undercut the other guy’s reasoned but unintuitive position with a little demagoguery. (Examples too numerous to mention.)

But it’s actually pretty hard to make any generalizations about the past without being wrong in some specific instances. History’s evidence is messy like that: you can always find some examples which don’t fit more general rules. The medieval world was patriarchal (in the sense of men, not women, holding power), but you can find a few women who rose to power and held onto it. That doesn’t make the wider generalization invalid, as long as you accept it’s a simplified model. Foucault’s work is very much about using a general model to view past societies.

Such uses of models (economic, sociological, religious etc) can always be criticised by more empirical historians for not fitting the facts closely enough, or distorting the evidence , and often correctly so. But the countervailing problem for empirical historians is that they can end up giving you an atomised history. If your archive tells you the attitude of twenty different people to servants in the early twentieth century, and there is also wider evidence from newspaper sources, should you not make a generalization, because somewhere there’s probably someone with a different attitude? If you can’t make generalizations and must stick only to the particular, you can do narrative history, but that’s about all.

To go back to one of the original parts of the post, historical ‘craftsmanship’ tends to be very much about careful use of the sources, and in that sense Foucault was not craftsman-like. But I think there is still room in history as a whole for a few people who aren’t craftsman-like, who can make big, bold and half-wrong statements which arouse interest and get a debate started. Most pioneering work, in particular, turns out to be wrong in its details; but without the pioneering work, the better, later histories wouldn’t be written (as David says of Thomas Kuhn, and as is certainly true of Karl Marx’s historical works).

I don’t want to hunt anyone, I simply believe that we should call people out when they make “courageous inferences” that aren’t correct or grounded in evidence. After all, I think he could have done what he wanted to do – examining the rise of the carceral state – without making those kind of claims. It’s not uncommon in the discipline that people reach for more than they can grab as an attempt to make their argument more vital or important.

I recognize this, and your point is well taken. However, I find it unlikely that, at any point in his career, Foucault simply “made something up”—such a thing is incredibly unlikely (especially taking into account the rigor he displayed in his research at times—for example during the formulation of The Birth of the Clinic, reading every book published in France on medicine during the time period). If someone can point me to such an instance though, I will stand corrected. At that point, he can certainly be labeled disingenuous (or at least a true student of Sir Walter Scott).

Until then, I will simply say, as I did before, that Foucault was able to give us new techniques and perspectives in which to approach historical phenomena. This doesn’t absolve him of the empirical failures he certainly had, and the questionable interpretations in which he engaged. However, he, much to the chagrin of the modern antiquarians, made “courageous” (in the Popperian sense) inferences that, despite some of their falsities, illuminated many previously ignored subjects.

It is now our task to do it better. Or we could go on a witch-hunt, which would rid the “canon” of many of its great “practitioners:

We could note, for example, that Ranke wasn’t a historian because he drank the Schelling kool-aid, or that Hobsbawm’s historical works reflect the fact that he was a Stalinist apologist more than an empiricist. So on and so forth.